Landscape in the arts

Friday, December 11, 2015

When We Came To This Shore

Following a big survey of landscape and music in 2013 and similar but shorter posts in 2012, 2011, and 2010, I highlighted just four releases this time last year. One of these, John Luther Adams' Become Ocean, has apparently been an inspiration to Taylor Swift. Perhaps one of these four will be up her street too? Each illustrates the way contemporary musicians are organising albums round a landscape idea or sense of place. Of course I could have chosen others and have deliberately excluded some musicians whose work I have discussed here before - Richard Skelton, Rob St John, Simon Scott. Feel free to suggest others in the comments below.

I'll begin with The Thompson Fields, an album for jazz orchestra by Maria Schneider which is named after farmland on the prairie where she grew up. The Telegraph'sreview explains that 'the liner notes are an indispensable part of the experience, picturing
the landscape and its wildlife through Audobon’s bird paintings and
photographs of country lanes that to a British viewer look remarkably
familiar – until you turn the page and encounter another image, which
shows this landscape is on an altogether vaster scale.' In an interview with extracts from the music at the NPR site she describes the region's great skies and spectacular weather. 'Maria Schneider, nature poet of jazz' she is called in a Boston Globearticle. It notes that 'The Monarch and the Milkweed' was 'inspired by the delicate
relationship between the title butterfly and the host environment on
which it depends.' Asked about this tune she said “I pictured each soloist as a person walking through a landscape and commenting on it.”

Another widely-praised American album drawing on memories of a specific locale was Daniel Bachman's River. As Pitchfork's review explains, 'he is a native of the northern Virginia city of Fredericksburg, near
where the Rappahannock River winds out of the Chesapeake Bay.' The album includes two cover versions, 'Levee' by Jack Rose and an old 1928 number by William Moore. 'Though divided by nearly a century, Rose and Moore both lived in the riverine area Bachman extols here; Rose grew up in Fredericksburg, and Moore used to cross the Rappahannock for work. Bachman treats their tales with the same familiarity and fondness he treats the land and his own life there.' Bachman writes in the record's liner notes that the Rappahanock, 'divides north and south, mountain and bay and, at one
point in time, it even separated two great armies.' In the clip below from the NPR site you can see him playing a track from the album at Stratford Hall, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee.

Stefan Betke recorded seminal glitsch albums as Pole in the nineties but has been relatively quiet since. He is now making music related to the walks he takes in the German countryside. According to Boomkat his new album Wald 'breaks down to three
movements: firstly a trio of tracks establishing and mirroring the
forest's spatial intricacy via sparse, overgrowing electronics; secondly
a trio of tracks focused on raw sounds - bird calls, rustling
textures, woody drums and naturally discordant drones; followed by a 3rd
and final section emulating nature's inherently psychedelic patterning
in filigree yet barely harnessed matrices of echo, reverb and delay.' Pitchfork think it 'may bring to mind Wolfgang Voigt's Gas
project, whose foggy swirls of classical samples were inspired by the
Black Forest and its role in German Romanticism. But the two artists'
impressions of the woods couldn't be more different. Where Gas is either
dark and claustrophobic or starlit and idyllic, Pole's Wald evokes porous thickets and branches stripped bare by the elements.'

The other day in Somerset House I was listening to 'What Does the Sea Say?', a soundscape composed by Martyn Ware (ex-Human League) and reflecting on how many famous names from post-punk bands are now composing music inspired by the landscape. John Foxx (once of Ultravox) is another, although he has now been working for many years in a psychogeographical vein, producing art and music on the theme of ruins and rewilding. This year he released London Overgrown, based on an idea of London as future garden city that would incorporate The Hanging Gardens of Shoreditch, The Glades of Soho and a resurrected Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. A collaborative work also released this year, Codex, includes tracks like 'The Pleasure Of Ruins' and 'When We Came To This Shore'. There is an interview at Metropolis/2520 with Foxx which mentions these albums and, although it's not strictly relevant, I will end here by quoting from this his lovely description of first hearing Erik Satie:

'I heard someone play the Gymnopédies one afternoon in the old lecture room at art school. I can still picture the instant – early summer, big open doors, the
view down the marvellous avenue of trees at Avenham, and that beautiful
elegant music. It is perfect minimalism, with poise and tranquillity,
like distilled civilisation in a few notes and a sound. I was
transfixed. it seemed to alter everything. I’ve loved piano ever since.
It really is my favourite sound in the world apart from a blackbird’s
song.'

3 comments:

Andrew, given the nature of your blog (which I discovered recently) as well as the topic at hand, can I share something with you? I made this a couple of years ago with a friend, as a small side project: https://soundcloud.com/varkanslor/susurrus

Here's another one I could have included. I like the way it is described on tiny mixtapes (where you can also hear a soundcloud): '“Alluvial” is one of six tracks on Crater, the new album by Daniel Menche and Mamiffer (Faith Coloccia and Aaron Turner), which, according to Menche, was created using recordings of hikes the three took together. Funny how a simple nature walk can be like the birth and death of a universe. Laughing and pizza were also involved and rightly so; pizza being one of the highest achievements of civilization.'

My book

About this site

This blog explores landscape through the arts: painting, installation, photography, literature, music, film... I've also on occasion covered the creation or alteration of landscapes by architects, artists and garden designers. For the first year I did several short entries each week; since then I have reduced the frequency and some posts are a bit longer. In naming this site 'Some Landscapes' initially I just saw it as a few modest notes and didn't know if I'd keep it up. Of course it will always only cover 'some' landscapes, even though I occasionally like to think of it as an expanding cultural gazetteer. There is a pretty long index (see above) listing the artists of all kinds that have been mentioned here. There are also maps and a chronology of posts. I started writing this blog using the name 'Plinius' (a little tribute to the younger and older Plinys) and am now rather attached to it as a 'nom de blog'. Comments are very welcome but are moderated to prevent spam. Plinus / Andrew Ray.